New Indicitive Timetable, page-28

Heres some of my recent research .. hard to find new stuff! .. so just some recaps

Buddy and AF Square

I know this is an old story but you can connect the dots

http://www.marketwired.com/press-re...as-troy-carters-af-square-invests-1801516.htm

Buddy's Angel Investors

Funding Received $5.4M in 5 Rounds from 6 Investors
Most Recent Funding $674.03k Venture on May 13, 2014

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/buddy#/entity

Buddy's Competion

Among today's BaaS vendors are Parse, Kinvey, Buddy, Appcelerator, StackMob and others

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-b...ata-exposure-to-Facebook-Google-Apple-NSA-etc

What is the best BaaS/MBaaS independent of any influence from (or data exposure to) Facebook, Google, Apple, NSA etc?

David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy.com
296 Views

First things first - I work at http://Buddy.com, so I just want to put that bias out there.

Secondly - forget about trying to find a provider of any sort that insulates you from the NSA. I think we've all learnt our lesson there.

"Best" is absolutely going to be subjective, but I can tell you that we at Buddy offer a very robust, highly scalable backend as a service for devices (not just mobile apps, but we support and service connected cars, home appliances, retail, etc...). Here's how I'd consider the various product offerings:

1) Data sovereignty - where is your data actually stored? When you create an app in Buddy, you can choose between the US, EU and China (with more to come).

2) What services do you actually need, and what are provided? If you just need user authentication/login only, you mind find a better fit at a provider than just does that (but unlikely that's ALL you'll need)

3) Cost - are you willing to trade performance for a $0 bill? Some providers bill by users, others by API calls, others by storage, other's by rate limits, and others by a mix of the above. Do the math carefully - especially if you expect a lot of users.

4) Data ownership - who owns not just your app data, but the data generated by usage of the app? It absolutely should be you (but find out who else gets rights equivalent to ownership)

5) Analytics - lots of folks will tell you they offer "analytics", but the honest truth is that 98% of BaaS customers just need/want "statistics". Unless you're applying data science and highly customized A/B testing to minute elements of your product - you need stats, not analytics. The question then is what form does that data take, and how easily can you get it out of the BaaS system you use?

6) Documentation - how well documented is the product? This goes hand in hand with support - but good documentation will save a large number of support calls you don't want to have to make!

At Buddy, we try to offer an excellent product around these pivots. I won't go into a sales pitch - you can check us out at http://buddy.com - but I do encourage you to shop around. Other BaaS providers that we like and enjoy competing with (at least on the mobile side) are Parse and Kinvey - both of whom also offer a high grade product.

I hope that helps!
Written 1 Oct 2014

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